Monday, January 17, 2011

The upcoming release of GeoTools represents a turning point for the GeoTools project - we are no longer taking part in GeoAPI.

Back in the dawn of time (well 2003) the GeoTools project started an experiment, and outreach program in the form of the GeoAPI project. Specifically this was an effort to collaborate with the deegree library (makes sense as both projects are LGPL and are working in the same domain).

Although not successful in its original goals of collaboration the GeoAPI project served as a great line of communication to the standards community. We would like to thank many of the amazing individuals who contributed their time, effort and expertise and extend an invitation for direct collaboration in the future.

A few things to keep in mind:

We must emphasis that this decision does not break any client code

The org.opengis interfaces will remain in the GeoTools library as part of the gt-opengis module

As part of this change a lot of "deprecations" have already been cleaned up (representing areas of GeoAPI where the standard had passed out of fashion)

GeoTools is committed to providing a stable API for your next (or current) Java project